Tag: Colin Trevorrow

REVIEW: Battle at Big Rock [2019]

Jared Mobarak

It’s one of them. If Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom had one purpose, it was for clone baby Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) to do what Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) couldn’t: let the dinosaurs go free. While the idea of using Lockwood resources to create an ark and save as many species as possible to exist in their own island sanctuary away from hubristic humans was a ruse to illegally sell them all off to the highest bidder, the mercenaries under Eli Mills’ (Rafe Spall) employ ended up playing Noah anyway.…

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REVIEW: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom [2018]

Jared Mobarak

They’re alive. Like me. Anyone who read/watched Jurassic Park in the 1990s should have known the product of John Hammond’s hubris: a marriage between mankind’s extinction and evolution into something more. This is what the themes of control and the lack thereof portend. To play God is to risk losing everything we have built in the past 300,000 years. Because whether we bring back that which nature destroyed (dinosaurs) or create something wholly new (through genetic manipulation and cloning), we breathe life into a being not meant for the present…

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REVIEW: The Book of Henry [2017]

Jared Mobarak

“I want to see the sky” There’s a lot of backlash against director Colin Trevorrow for reasons he didn’t necessarily earn. Most of the vitriol stems from his being scooped up by the Hollywood studio machine after helming just one indie film. That debut was the Sundance award-winning Safety Not Guaranteed, a small-scale sci-fi written by Derek Connolly. Suddenly Trevorrow was vaulted to A-list status—again something he didn’t quite earn—to helm Jurassic World and to takeover Star Wars: Episode IX from another festival darling turned tent-pole director Josh Trank (whose…

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REVIEW: Jurassic World [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“This will give parents nightmares” As all good sequels must learn, the key to success is delivering on the promise set forth by the original while also providing something fresh and improved. Just ask James Cameron, a master at the task, who injected action-packed life into both Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day without negating or watering down the mythology still relevant beneath those newfound popcorn blockbuster sensibilities. Neither The Lost World nor Jurassic Park III did it. They decided to both reinvent the wheel and forget what the appeal…

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REVIEW: Safety Not Guaranteed [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“My calibrations are flipping pinpoint, okay?” Sweetly cute, subtly intelligent, and simply life affirming in the best possible way, Safety Not Guaranteed is the epitome of indie darling. Reminiscent to Chronicle from earlier this year, director Colin Trevorrow and writer Derek Connolly have really taken care to use genre clichés in a way that somehow makes them appear fresh. We’ve seen the reporter lying for a story only to end up falling for her subject. We’ve seen the misunderstood weirdo toe the line between insanity and the impossible to give…

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